https://www.pczone.co.uk/hardware-vs-software-ray-tracing-whats-the-difference/

It's not just about performance, that is a fallacious line of thinking.

Often a feature gets introduced not because of performance reasons, but because it may also reduce development burden on game developers.
Remember what runs on top of graphics hardware... Games.
nVidia and AMD both work closely with developers and various API's to extract as much ease-of-development as possible with various development tools and optimizations.

I.E. Case in point TressFX. - It allows for advanced simulation of hair, grass and fur by leveraging various middle-ware libraries that just happened to be GPU accelerated. - It greatly expedited development time, but enabling it? There was certainly an impact to performance and efficiency, but that was worth the trade-off for the visual gains.

So no. It's not just about performance, it's often just about reducing development time and increasing visuals.

Both the PS5 and Series X rely on their CUs to achieve Ray Tracing. RDNA2 doesn’t have dedicated RT and Tensor cores like Nvidia’s RTX approach.

If we forget for a moment about PS5 vs XSX (which is the part that makes everybody shut their doors) and just focus on RDNA2 vs RDNA1, there has been a few articles outlining the differences between them.

"Ever since AMD announced the RDNA2 architecture, they have reiterated a singular goal: they wanted to achieve a 50% jump in perf-per-watt over RDNA1. And that they would accomplish it entirely with architectural improvements, not process improvements..."

"Along with numerous optimizations to the power efficiency of their GPU architecture, RDNA2 also includes a much-needed update to the graphics side of AMD’s GPU architecture. RDNA (1), though a massive replumbing of the core compute architecture, did not include any graphics feature upgrades. As a result, AMD only offered a DirectX feature level 12_1 feature set – the same as the Radeon RX Vega series – at a time when NVIDIA was offering ray tracing and the other features that have since become DirectX 12 Ultimate"

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16202/amd-reveals-the-radeon-rx-6000-series-rdna2-starts-at-the-highend-coming-november-18th/2

And about Primitive Shaders and Mesh Shaders being exactly the same, not quite. 

"A Mesh shader is a new type of shader that combines vertex and primitive processing. VS, HS, DS, and GS shader stages are replaced with Amplification Shader and Mesh Shader. Roughly, Mesh shaders replace VS+GS or DS+GS shaders and Amplification shaders replace VS+HS."

https://microsoft.github.io/DirectX-Specs/d3d/MeshShader.html

"Mesh shaders represent a radical simplification of the geometry pipeline. With a mesh shader enabled, all the shader stages and fixed-function features described above are swept away. Instead, we get a clean, straightforward pipeline using a compute-shader-like programming model. Importantly, this new pipeline is both highly flexible—enough to handle the existing geometry tasks in a typical game, plus enable new techniques that are challenging to do on the GPU today— it looks like it should be quite performance-friendly, with no apparent architectural barriers to efficient GPU execution."

https://www.starcitizen.gr/2642867-2/

Not necessarily. Most of the loss in power does translate into... well... heat. If a lighter supply is feeding a more powerful machine, there's less heat generation from the PSU. In other words... if the PS5 does have a more powerful unit, it might be generating more heat. 

Not necessarily. Most of the loss in power does translate into... well... heat. If a lighter supply is feeding a more powerful machine, there's less heat generation from the PSU. In other words... if the PS5 does have a more powerful unit, it might be generating more heat. 

Actually, the exact opposite could be true.

If a 350W ps operates in its "comfort zone", and a 320W ps operates slightly above its "comfort zone", then the latter ps generates more heat.

However, the whole thing depends on the voltage regulator circuitry. Contrary to what you seem to think, the ps does not feed "the machine", it feeds the voltage regulator circuitry (where much more heat is generated than in the ps). The vrc is the place where money vs heat is traded at design time (more phases = less heat but higher costs).

Nothing has been revealed about where the ps work or how the vrcs are built so any discussion about "this comsole is better than that one" is pointless.

I'm going on a limb and saying they are both operating at normal capacity. 

Well, at that point we're dealing with internal components so our guess will pretty much be moot unless we get someone like Louis Rossmann to tear both consoles down and look at them on a component level. I do assume that they are going to be fairly similar if not identical however. If this is the case, then the ball falls back on the PSU's energy loss and not the heat generation of the SoC (there's a good reason why the CPU and PSU get the cooling on the spot, but then again, we're dealing with APUs, so presumably the heat is going somewhere else. 

This is marketing of course they would say they have the 'full RNDA 2' feature set they created half of them in collaboration with AMD. Sony simply can't call it half of those since they've trademarked some of the names with Direct X. In addition people focusing on RDNA 1, 2, 3 feature as technobabble to one up each other is wrong. Both consoles are RDNA 2 based consoles one is just a but more customised and the other is designed with the 'full' features that work on DirectX.

PS5 does indeed have 'mesh shading' and 'VRR'. Sony has removed the standard VRR and customised the Geometry Engine for their needs.

This entire thread of patents is the PS5's mesh rendering, Variable Rate Shading all wrapped in their Geometry Engine. It effectively, varies the detail of objects in virtual space, will procedurally generating high quality textures with objects closest to the game camera https://t.co/Ha1fI1hM9l

— That Writer Deezy (@DeezyDevs) October 30, 2020

Both have the same or similar features sets. Different names and different way of going about it. Also a bit misleading of Microsoft since Series X/S don't have Infinity Cache, but there you go. Enjoy your consoles, both will be powerful machines. stop sweating the details :p

That is certainly an interesting read. I just can't help but wonder why Sony decided to leave the technology inside their chip out of their marketing strategy, and especially out of Cerny's presentation. You would think that saying "Hey, our chip might be smaller but it has all these cool technologies" sounds better than saying "smaller chips are nimble."